Comment by wkat4242
12 hours ago
Yeah I still use pgp a lot. Especially because of hardware backed tokens (on yubikey and openpgp cards) which I use a lot for file encryption. The good thing is that there's toolchains for all desktop OSes and mobile (Android, with openkeychain).
I'm sure there's better options but they're not as ubiquitous. I use it for file encryption, password manager (pass) and SSH login and everything works on all my stuff, with hardware tokens. Even on my tablet where Samsung cheaped out by not including NFC I can use the USB port.
Replacements like fido2 and age fall short by not supporting all the usecases (file encryption for fido2, hardware tokens for age) or not having a complete toolchain on all platforms.
I use pcks11 on my yubikeys, would I gain something by using the PGP functionality instead?
Easier tooling. At least on Linux. PKCS11 requires a dynamically linked library (.so) which you pass to programs using it (like SSH) which is a bit annoying and because it's a binary linking it's not an API you can easily debug. It tends to just crash especially with version mismatches. The GPG agent API is easier for this. It works over a socket and can even be forwarded over SSH connections.
Usually you end up using OpenSC/OpenCT for that. Also the tooling to manage the virtual smartcards is usually not as easy. I haven't used PIV for this (which is probably what you use on the yubikey to get PKCS11) but it was much harder to get going than simply using GPG Agent/scdaemon/libpcscd and the command "gpg card-edit" to configure the card itself.
It's still not quite easy but I found it easier than PKCS11. I used that before with javacards and SmartHSM cards. The good thing about the PIV functionality is that it integrates really well with Windows active directory, which PGP of course doesn't. So if you're on Windows, PIV (with PKCS11) is probably the way to go (or Fido2 but it's more Windows Hello for Business rather than AD functionality then, it depends whether you're a legacy or modern shop).
The big benefit of yubikeys over smartcards is that you can use the touch functionality to approve every use of the yubikey, whereas an unlocked smartcard will approve every action without a physical button press (of course because it doesn't have such a button).
I second this!